Joseph Gandy, A Scene in Ancient Rome: A Setting for Titus Andronicus, I, ii, c. 1830. Yale Center for British Art.
The two centuries that followed the age of Augustus were the period in which the Roman world reached its fullest extent. By the early second century, under Trajan, the empire stretched from Britain to Mesopotamia, from the Rhine to the Sahara, governing a population estimated at between sixty and seventy million people across three continents. The network of roads, aqueducts, harbours, and fortified frontiers that connected these territories allowed goods, people, and information to move across distances that no previous Mediterranean power had administered. The relative stability of this period, conventionally described as the Pax Romana, rested on the capacity of that network to function across linguistic, religious, and administrative boundaries that the centre could coordinate but never fully control.
What travelled along that network was not only commerce and military orders but a shared cultural language. The western provinces spoke Latin and adopted Roman legal and municipal forms. The eastern provinces continued to speak Greek, to worship Greek gods, and to read Greek literature, and the administration of an empire that contained both required people who could move between the two. By the second century, educated Romans were expected to have studied in Athens or Rhodes and to hold informed views on the philosophical traditions that the Greek world had been refining for centuries. The Greek philosophical schools in Athens operated under the formal patronage of Roman power, and their continuity came to depend on the willingness of that power to accommodate them within its legal framework.
The scale of Roman investment in the Greek intellectual world survives in the physical record. In Herculaneum, buried by Vesuvius in 79 CE, a waterfront villa contained the only intact library to survive from antiquity: more than eighteen hundred papyrus scrolls, the overwhelming majority of them texts from the school founded by Epicurus in Athens around 306 BCE, a tradition that taught the pursuit of mental tranquillity through the study of nature and the company of friends. The library was assembled by a Roman consul who regarded this philosophy as a practical guide to the conduct of public life.
The Epicurean school was among the Greek institutions that operated under Roman patronage in this period, and Plotina, the widow of the emperor Trajan, had maintained a longstanding connection with it. In 121, the head of the school faced a legal difficulty: under Roman law, he could only appoint a successor who was a Roman citizen, and the will had to be written in Latin. The restrictions threatened to end a line of transmission that had passed from teacher to student for over four centuries. The school’s head asked Plotina to bring the case before Hadrian. She wrote to the emperor, Hadrian changed the regulation, and the correspondence was preserved in a series of inscriptions in Athens.
A tradition of philosophical transmission that had passed unbroken from teacher to student for over four centuries could have ended on a legal technicality in the Roman law of succession. The inscriptions in Athens record the correspondence in full, and they remain among the most detailed surviving evidence of how closely the continuity of the Greek intellectual world in this period was bound to the administrative decisions of Rome.
The Plotina Skirt
Selected Reading
- Woolf, Greg. Rome: An Empire’s Story. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
- Everitt, Anthony. Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome. New York: Random House, 2009.
- Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011.